Benjamin Lindley,
Director of Strategic Reputation Management was lucky enough to spend some time
talking to Dave Sumner Smith last week. Dave is CEO of Next Dimension Media -
the world's biggest operator of LinkedIn groups. Next Dimension can connect with over one
million people through its LinkedIn groups. If you consider that The Times of
India, the world's most widely read English language newspaper, has a total readership of just over three million, Next Dimension's
figure starts looking incredibly impressive. Benjamin asked Dave for his
thoughts regarding advertising in social media. Here is Dave's response:
"Soft-selling
through influential people in the world of social media has become an
incredibly powerful modern marketing tool. Its capability to instantly reach
many thousands of people is unparalleled and outstrips by far the efficiency of
traditional advertising in print media.”
Now that is a serious statement, and businesses who are still not
investing in social media marketing should pay heed. Consider the Next
Dimension-operated group Linked:HR on LinkedIn. It has more than 815,000
members. Any post sent out to Linked:HR is instantly available to all
its members to read, digest, and respond to AS SOON as it is posted. This is an
incredibly quick and efficient way to reach a targeted audience. Traditional
print media cannot hope to be as efficient an advertising medium as social media.
Dave Sumner Smith agrees:
“It
was not so long ago that companies and organisations sought to distribute their
PR and marketing messages to media outlets and publishers. But the world has
changed. Now everyone has the ability to become a publisher or media outlet
using blogs and social media channels.”
And what is the benefit of using real individuals to soft-sell your
products? For the consumer, it makes sure that the reviewer is unbiased and the
product is of good quality. And for the manufacturer of the product, it
provides a trusted advertising avenue straight to the consumer. How so?
Traditional advertising comes with an inherent negative bias. Readers of
magazines resent the page space taken up with adverts written in a font that
hurts their eyes, advertising a product they may not even be interested in.
However, followers of a self-publicist on Twitter have an inherent positive
bias to the things that individual says or recommends. This is the essence of a
soft-sell.
Get in touch with Strategic Reputation Management today to discuss
your online marketing and to request a free audit of your business' online
presence: www.srm-uk.co.uk info@srm-uk.co.uk
Read below for more from Dave Sumner Smith....
Will
bloggers win the battle with traditional media?
Social media lets anyone become a publisher. Some
well-connected individuals are already more influential than traditional
newspapers and magazines. Businesses are starting to wake up to their media
value – and the pace of change is getting faster all the time.
Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450
marked the birth of media as we used to know it. Authors published books, while
‘pamphleteers’ were able to print leaflets and distribute messages. Over time
these evolved into ‘news sheets’ that went on to become newspapers and
magazines. These became very powerful, with newspaper publishers holding
considerable power over politics and society.
Magazines had influence too. Consumer titles informed and
entertained. Business magazines were a valuable way to take editorial and
advertising messages to specific groups of business decision makers. The
Readers’ Letters page even let them write back.
‘Columnists’
held power too. The wise editorial column in the newspaper or the witty comment
page in the magazine influenced the views and decisions of readers. The best
informed and most entertaining writers became media stars.
Then came social media. It was like the Readers Letters
page taking over the magazine. The editorial and advertising messages were
secondary. The audience was now the media itself.
Historic ‘pampleteers’ started on a small scale. So too
did the people who owned groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. The vast majority had
very limited success. Their horizons were as limited as village newsletters.
But some have gone on to achieve considerable success. Check www.pagedatapro.com and
you will see the biggest Facebook group has more than 274 million likes. There
are hundreds with more than a million followers.
Scales are smaller on the B2B network LinkedIn, but there
are hundreds of groups with more than 100,000 members and the largest
professional discussion network boasts more than 800,000.
Businesses have not been blind to the power of these new
media channels. Oracle, for example, runs Facebook communities such as Oracle
Social. It has Twitter handles too, including Oracle and BizTekForum and
LinkedIn groups such as The Business Technology Forum and Mission Critical
Systems Forum.
But groups are not the only way channel for businesses to
influence their supply chain and customers. Because media is becoming
personalised. Companies and media companies are not the only ones with
influence. Individuals are becoming powerful too.
It is no surprise to see global celebrities such as
Rihanna, Eminem, Shakira, Lady Gaga and Cristiano Ronaldo with more than 50
million ‘likes’ each on Facebook. But the name Michelle Phan is perhaps less
familiar. Writing and recording about skincare and cosmetics, she has nearly
1.4 million likes on Facebook and around a third of her 3.5 million YouTube
subscribers watch her weekly videos. Magazine writer turned blogger Joanna
Goddard attracts more than 5 million page views (plus some valuable sponsors)
to ‘A Cup of Jo’ while designer, food enthusiast and blogger Joy Cho does even
better with 14.5 million followers on Pinterest.
While these big numbers are impressive and put many
traditional media outlets in the shade, the power of the best connected
individuals are even more impressive when you dig below the surface. Special
tools make it possible to identify the most influential people in any specific
topic area – no matter how precisely defined.
Doug Ngo, the CNET technology editor, currently ranks as
the most powerful writer about server hardware, for example, while Barb Darrow
of GigaOM is the biggest influencer for cloud computing. But the rankings
change by the day – and there are thousands of others whose views have an
impact on people investigating a topic.
Bloggers. Writers. Influencers. The descriptive term does
not matter. The important thing to recognise is their power. When potential
customers are researching a topic, they can ‘drill down’ into a
precisely-defined area of interest. The more precise they get, the smaller the
pool of influencers, and the greater the power that each of these influencers
holds.
Analytics and other technologies make it relatively easy
to identify powerful influencers in any niche. Meantime, the syndication tools
that previously allowed stories, case studies, press releases and videos to be
distributed to newspapers and magazines are being redeveloped to target these
social media influencers.
Put the two together and what have you got? A precisely
targeted marketing process in which stories are supplied to and ‘published’ by
key influencers in any subject area. It could represent as much of a threat to
traditional publishers as online magazines and electronic publishing have done.
But history suggests those that embrace change and adopt new technologies will
survive and prosper.
